A Man Rides Through

  Geraden seemed to hear the Adept through an abrupt roaring in his ears, a tumult of anger and distress. The suggestion that he might have come back without Terisa by choice, that he had turned his back on her in some way, was more than he could bear.

  Harshly, struggling to control his passion, he demanded, “Let me go, Havelock. I need your mirrors.”

  As if he had been stung, the Adept let out a wail.

  He dropped his hands, plunged himself to the floor; before Geraden could react, he kissed the toes of Geraden’s boots. Then he scuttled backward. When he hit the leg of a table, he bounded to his feet.

  Crouching in the intense stance of a man about to do battle, he commented casually, almost playfully, “If you ever talk to Joyse like that, he’ll cut your heart out. Or force you to marry all his daughters. With him it’s hard to tell the difference.”

  Shocked and disconcerted, Geraden turned a plea for help toward Master Barsonage.

  Grimly, the mediator nodded. Swallowing to hold down a bellyful of uneasiness, he stepped forward, edged his bulk a bit between the Adept and Geraden.

  Geraden took that opportunity to turn his back on both of them.

  Deliberately, he placed himself before the first full-length flat mirror he could find.

  It was an especially elegant piece of work: he noticed its beauty in spite of his concentration on other things, because he loved mirrors. Its rosewood frame was nearly as tall as he was, and the wood had a deep, burnished glow which only long hours of care and polish could produce. The surface of the glass was meticulous, both in its flatness and in its craftsmanship. The glass itself held an evanescent suggestion of pink – a color which now appeared to complement the frame, although of course the frame had actually been chosen to suit the glass.

  And the Image—

  Bare sand. Nothing else.

  Wind had whipped the sand into a dune with a keen, curled edge, like a breaker frozen in motion; but there was no wind now. The color of the sky was a dry, dusty blue that he associated almost automatically with Cadwal.

  In some ways, this landscape was the purest he had ever seen, too clean even for bleached bones. No one and nothing alive had ever set foot on that dune.

  Only urgency kept him from studying every inch of the mirror, simply to understand the Image – and to appreciate the workmanship.

  He had no idea how Terisa worked with flat glass. And he had no particular reason to believe he could do the same thing. In fact, he hardly knew how he had contrived to translate himself from the laborium to the Closed Fist. He certainly hadn’t done anything to prove himself an arch-Imager.

  Nevertheless he didn’t hesitate.

  He came back alive. Without her. Geraden would never have done such a thing.

  Facing the glass, he closed his eyes; he swept his thoughts clear. Master Barsonage and Adept Havelock were watching him, and Terisa was lost, and he had never tried anything like this before. Yet he had the strongest feeling—He pulled his concentration together, firmly wiped panic and confusion and anguish out of his heart.

  In the mirror of his mind, he began to construct an Image of Esmerel.

  Still trying to intervene between Geraden and Havelock, the mediator asked the Adept carefully, “You mentioned King Joyse. Do you know where he is?”

  “He has flown,” spat back Havelock, his mouth full of vitriol. “Like a bird, ha-ha. You think he has abandoned you, but it is a lie, a lie, a lie. When everything else is lost, he breaks my heart and gives me nothing.”

  Geraden ignored both of them.

  He found it easy to ignore distractions now. Something luminous was taking place. He had no training in Image-building; no Imager practiced that skill. He was working with an entirely new concept: that the Image of a mirror could be chosen; that translations could be done which ignored the apparent Image of a mirror. As new to the world as Terisa herself. And yet the process of creating the Image he wanted in his mind excited him; it enabled him to close his attention to anything which interfered.

  Line by line, feature by feature, he put together a picture of Eremis’ “ancestral Seat.”

  He had only seen it once, of course – and only from the outside. He had no notion what it looked like inside. But that didn’t worry him. He believed that the scenes and landscapes in mirrors were real, that Images were reflections rather than inventions. So if he could induce the glass to show Esmerel from the outside, the manor’s true interior would be included automatically.

  “What do you mean,” asked Master Barsonage, “ ‘flown’?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer, however. He may not have been listening to himself at all.

  Esmerel was a relatively low building in a deep, wedge-shaped valley with a brook bubbling picturesquely over its stones and outcroppings of rock like ramparts all along the walls – not low because of any lack of sweep or grace in its design, but because it was constructed on only one rambling, aboveground level. According to rumor, some of the best features of the house were belowground, dug down into the rock of the valley: an enviable wine cellar; a gallery for weavings, paintings, and small sculptures; a vast library; several research halls. But naturally Geraden knew nothing about those things. He knew, however, that a portico defined the entrance – a portico with massive redwood pillars for columns. The entrance, as he remembered it, was plain, only one lamp in a leaded glass frame on either side, no carving on the panels of the doors. The house’s walls were layered planks – waxed rather than painted against Tor’s weather – but all the corners and intersections were stone, with the result that Esmerel’s face had a pleasingly varied texture.

  Unless something had happened since he had seen it – or unless his memory or his imagination had gone wrong – Master Eremis’ home looked precisely like that.

  Master Barsonage let out a stifled gasp. His respiration was labored, as if he had stuffed his fist into his mouth and was trying to breathe around it.

  To commemorate the occasion, Adept Havelock began whistling thinly through his teeth.

  Geraden opened his eyes.

  The mirror in front of him showed a sand dune under a calm sky, almost certainly somewhere in Cadwal.

  The pang of his disappointment was so acute that he nearly groaned aloud.

  “I would not have believed it,” whispered Barsonage. “When I was first told that such things could happen, I did not believe it.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” inquired the Adept politely. “That’s how I know this isn’t Apt Geraden. Even if he did talk to me that way. A man who can do this wouldn’t have to come back without her.”

  Geraden blinked hard, shook his head. No, he wasn’t going blind. The Image he was staring at hadn’t changed at all.

  Distressed and baffled, he turned toward Master Barsonage—

  —and saw Esmerel, as clear as sunlight, exactly as he had envisioned it, in the curved mirror standing beside the flat glass he had chosen to work with.

  “By the pure sand of dreams,” he murmured, “that’s incredible.” A curved mirror, a curved mirror. Excitement leaped up in him; he could hardly restrain a yell. “I wouldn’t have believed it myself.” A curved mirror, of course! Flat glass was Terisa’s talent, not his. If he had tried to translate himself through a flat glass, he would have gone mad. Like Havelock.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Havelock advised sententiously. “If you think I’m going to kiss your boots again, just because you can do a little trick like that, you’re full of shit.”

  But curved glass—! Like the only mirror he had ever been able to make for himself, the mirror which had reached Terisa behind the Image of the champion. He could shift the Images in curved mirrors.

  Quickly, before he had time to be overwhelmed by his discovery, he approached the glass and began to adjust the focus.

  “Now I’ll find her.” The pressure of hope and need cramped his lungs. “I’ll get her away from you, you bastard. If I find you, I’ll even get you. Just try to stop me
. Just try.”

  Fighting the tremors in his hands, the long shivers which made his fingers twitch, he tipped the mirror’s frame to bring the Image of Esmerel closer.

  Distance was the problem, distance. He knew that – and tried to keep it out of his mind, tried not to let it terrify him. If the focus of the Image was too far from the place where Terisa was being held, he wouldn’t be able to adjust the mirror enough to reach her. Every glass had a limited range: it couldn’t be focused more than a certain distance from its natural Image. If he couldn’t reach Terisa, he would have to start over again from the beginning: based on what he learned now, he would have to build the Image of Esmerel again, re-create it in his mind – but closer this time, closer.

  In his present turmoil, that kind of concentration might be impossible.

  No, don’t fail, he exhorted the glass, don’t fail now, you’ve never done anything right in your life except love her, she’s all there is for you and Orison and Mordant and even Alend, don’t fail now.

  With a jerk because his hand was unsteady, the Image moved to a near view of the entrance under the portico.

  Another jerk.

  The Image moved into the forehall of the manor.

  Geraden stopped breathing.

  Like the exterior walls, the floor was formed of fitted planks anchored with stone. Years of use and wax made the boards gleam, but couldn’t conceal the fact that men who didn’t care what damage they did had been there in nailed boots – had been there recently. Mud, footprints, gouged spots, splinters: they were all distinct in the Image.

  Nevertheless the forehall was empty.

  Sweat streamed into Geraden’s eyes. He scrubbed at it with the back of his hand. Dimly, he was aware that both Master Barsonage and Adept Havelock were standing over him, watching his search; but he had no attention to spare for them.

  More smoothly, he moved the Image into the first room which opened off the forehall.

  A large sitting room: the kind of room in which formal guests sipped sweet wines before dinner. Tracked with mud and boot marks.

  Bloodstains.

  Deserted.

  “Why is no one there?” asked the mediator softly. “Where is Master Eremis? Where are his mirrors – his power?”

  Geraden’s heart constricted. Nausea rose in his throat as he moved the Image through the house.

  A cavernous dining room. More mud and boot marks, more bloodstains. The edges of the table were ragged with swordcuts.

  Deserted.

  Oh, Terisa, please, where are you?

  Geraden scanned two more fouled rooms, both empty, then located a wide staircase sweeping downward.

  “The cellars,” murmured Master Barsonage. “That is where they would imprison her.”

  Of course. The cellars. Esmerel’s equivalent of a dungeon. Eremis wouldn’t keep his mirrors or his apparatus or any of his secrets where passersby or even tradesmen might catch sight of them. Everything would be belowground.

  Who was responsible for all this mud, all these boot marks?

  Geraden nudged the Image downward.

  For the first few steps, he was so absorbed in what he was doing – so caught up in the focus of the glass, the search for Terisa, the need to succeed – that he didn’t understand what was about to happen to him, didn’t realize the truth at all, even though it was perfectly plain in front of him, so obvious that any farmer or stonemason, any ordinary man or woman, would have grasped it automatically.

  But then the Image began to dim, began to grow palpably dim in the glass, and Master Barsonage croaked, “Light.”

  Light.

  Geraden’s hands froze on the frame. His whole body lost movement, as if the breath and blood had been swept out of him. The stairs loomed below him darkly, treads descending into an immeasurable black.

  There was no light. No lamps or lanterns or torches or candles. They had been extinguished.

  The Image still existed, of course; but without light there was nothing to see.

  He had no answer to that defense. By that one stroke, any attempt to rescue Terisa was instantly and effectively prevented. He couldn’t help her if he couldn’t find her – and how could he find her if he couldn’t see her?

  “Maybe—” The air seemed to thicken in his lungs; he felt like he was suffocating. “Maybe there’s light farther down. Maybe only the stairs are dark.”

  At once, Master Barsonage clamped a warning hand onto his shoulder. “Geraden,” he hissed as if the former Apt were far away, lost in urgency, almost out of reach, “how will you find it? If there is light, how will you find it? You cannot focus an Image you cannot see. You may shift it into the foundations of the house, where no light will ever reach.”

  “I’ve got to try.” Geraden was choking. The mediator’s hand on his shoulder was choking him. “Don’t you understand? I’ve got to find her.”

  “No!” Master Barsonage insisted. Geraden’s passion appeared to affect him like anguish. “You cannot focus an Image you cannot see.”

  That was true. Of course. Any idiot could have told him that. Even a failed Apt who had never done anything right in his life could recognize the truth. Darkness made all mirrors blind – and all Imagers.

  Somehow, Geraden stepped back against the pressure of Barsonage’s grip. Facing the Image as it blurred into the obscure depths, he said harshly, “Then I’ll have to go myself.”

  With a look of iron on his face, and no hope in his heart, he made the mental adjustment of translation and stepped into the glass.

  As his face crossed into the Image, he cried out, “Terisa!”

  Master Barsonage wrenched him back so hard that he sprawled among the tables.

  Before he could regain his feet – or curse or fight – Adept Havelock sat down on his chest, straddling his neck.

  “Listen to me,” the Adept snarled, savage with strain. “I can’t do this for long.” His eyes rolled as if he were going into a seizure. “You can make us let you go. Just use that voice. We’ll obey. But we won’t be able to get you back.”

  Geraden bucked against the Adept, tried to pitch Havelock off him. Havelock braced his legs on either side, clutched at Geraden’s jerkin with both hands, hung on.

  “Listen to me, you fool! Your power sustains the shift! When you translate yourself, that glass will revert to its natural Image. You’ll be cut off! – you and the lady Terisa both! You’ll both be lost!”

  It was too much. Geraden flung Adept Havelock aside. He surged to his feet. With all his strength, he punched Master Barsonage in the chest – a blow which nearly made the massive Imager take a step backward.

  Then he faced the mirror and began to howl.

  “Eremis! Don’t touch her!”

  FORTY-TWO: UNEXPECTED TRANSLATIONS

  Eremis was touching her. He was certainly touching her.

  She had never been strong enough against him. Her concentration had never been strong enough. While he had approached her in the audience hall, while he had threatened Geraden, while he had fought with the Tor, she had attempted something she didn’t know how to do, something she had never heard of before: wild with anger and desperation, she had tried to reach out to the mirror which had brought him here and change it.

  On some level, she knew that was impossible. She was on the wrong side of the glass, the side of the Image, not the side of the Imager. But the knowledge meant nothing to her. If she could feel a translation taking place, surely that gave her a link, a channel? And she didn’t have any other way to fight. Her need was that extreme: she didn’t care that what she was trying was probably insane. Her strange and unmeasured talent was her only weapon. If she could fade, if she could go far enough away to reach his mirror—

  His hands made that impossible. They forced her to the surface of herself when she most needed to sink away.

  First there was his grip on her arm. He flung her toward the translation point as if it were a wall against which he intended to break her bones. But he
didn’t let her go.

  Then there was the bottomless instant of translation, the eternal dissolution.

  Then there was a completely different kind of light.

  It was orange and hot, part furnace, part torches – and full of smoke, rankly scented. Another man was there, someone she hadn’t seen before, a blur as Eremis impelled her past him, kept her spinning. Gilbur and Gart were right behind her, as blurred as everything else.

  And Eremis was shouting, “The lights! Put out the lights!”

  Before she could get her eyes into focus, see anything clearly, the torches dove into buckets of sand; a clang closed the door of the furnace. Darkness slammed against her like a wave of heat.

  “What went wrong?” someone demanded in a rattling voice.

  “Geraden,” snapped Master Eremis. “He remains alive. We must not let him see this place.”

  “I tried to kill him,” Gilbur snarled. “I hit him hard. But that puppy is stronger than he appears.”

  “She must not see it,” continued Eremis. “She is his creation. Who knows what bonds exist between them? Perhaps they are able to share Images in their minds.”

  The first voice, the man she didn’t know, made an assenting noise. “Then it is good that we were prepared for this eventuality. If we were in the Image-room—” A moment later, he added, “It would be interesting to learn what he does when he regains consciousness.”

  “As long as he cannot find us,” muttered Master Gilbur.

  “In the dark?” Master Eremis laughed. “Have no fear of that.” He sounded exultant, almost happy. His grip on Terisa shifted; with one hand, he held both her arms behind her back. “She is mine now – and they are ours. No matter that Geraden still lives, and Kragen. That will only add spice to the sauce. They will do exactly what we wish.”

  “And Joyse?” asked the rattling voice.

  “You saw,” rasped Gilbur. “He fled when we appeared. No doubt he is cowering in some hidey-hole, hoping for mad Havelock to save him.”